Will Gregory: ‘I was also partly inspired by a sense of guilt, looking at a room full of old synthesisers languishing unused’.
Photograph: York Tillyer/PR

Wendy Carlos’s 1968 record Switched On Bach unleashed the Moog synthesiser on the general public in a spectacular way. She created her groundbreaking albums using a multitrack recorder in the studio, allowing one person to layer up all the parts, one at a time. I was listening to it recently, and found myself wondering if anyone had tried to recreate this orchestra-of-synths concept in real time by assembling a large group of keyboardists, synths and amplifiers in a room all together. Live.

I was also partly inspired by a sense of guilt looking at a room full of old synthesisers languishing unused and clogging up my studio; 10 phone calls later there we all were trying to wrestle our way through Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, hooting with laughter.

But why monosynths? These early instruments can only play one note at a time and were quickly superseded by more complex polyphonic synthesisers. Given that they usually had no presets (no way to remember and recall a sound), no Midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface, an 80s innovation that allowed synths to be played from computers and sequencers no matter how complex the part), and only played one note at a time, to use these obtuse instruments today is bordering on daft.

Certainly at the time they were developed, in the 1970s, the huge profusion of keyboards were all trying desperately to overcome these perceived shortcomings. Outbidding each other for market share, gradually the number of voices increased, limited presets emerged and a primitive system of communication was invented, so one keyboard could talk to another. By the early 80s the death knell for analogue synths came with Yamaha’s DX7. It could play 16 notes, it had memory, and many of its sounds were spookily like real acoustic instruments. With Midi it could outperform anything produced in the 70s (well, anything that cost less than £30,000).

If sunlight falls on them they shoot off the grid and suddenly you have a roomful of what sounds like sick bagpipes

Musicians traded in their analogue gear and skips brimmed with monosynths. But today that has all changed. Why? Firstly, I think because of unlimited digital recording. If you were recording a Moog bass line in the 70s you had to be a specialist. You had to be able to shape the sound in real time, play with great feel and accuracy, and know how to navigate your way back to where you were for a retake or an edit. Editing 24-track tape is no joke. Nowadays you just go in to loop record, jam away for hours if you like, go back, pick the best bits, edit them into time and if you want to change the part you just cut and paste in seconds. It’s a technique that benefits all types of recording, but it particularly suits these analogue beasts which can be wild and unpredictable. Presets and Midi are no longer the crutch they once were.

Then there’s the sounds themselves. It turns out that sounding like an acoustic instrument was not the holy grail after all – samplers grabbed that territory. Sounding electronic is good. In fact the best-loved synths are the ones that only sound exactly like what they are – elegantly designed electric circuits that produce basic waveforms coupled to some big knobs that let you grapple directly with the what you are hearing as you hear it. Which leads me on to monosynths.

If you’re playing a single line with one hand, the other free to range around the controls, wobbling, fizzing, bending, distorting. Many of the instruments also have a pedal input so you can bring your feet in to play as well.

Suddenly you are entering the territory that a conventional acoustic instrument inhabits – you’ve got a large expressive range that lets the performer feel at one with their instrument. And this is of course the true holy grail of any musician. This is what, after 40 years, people are realising these 70s inventions had. They even go out of tune like acoustic instruments – if someone opens a door or if sunlight falls on them they shoot off the grid and suddenly you have a roomful of what sounds like sick bagpipes.

The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble rehearsing. Photograph: York Tillyer/PR

But they also offered more than that. And this is where I get a bit excited. Get 10 great experienced players together who have this “at one with their instrument” thing going on and it’s fantastic, but so far we are still in the realm of conventional chamber music, albeit with extended ranges of colour and depth and height.

Remember the primitive system of communication I mentioned earlier? Well it turns out that this function has proved truly longsighted. You can plug all the synths together so they are rhythmically linked – locked together to a master clock. But only the rhythm. The pitches and tones are still in the hands of the performer, so the expressive potential if not the rhythm is still in human hands. With these monosynths you can get inhumanly fast (or slow) complex pulses that phase, bounce off each other and interlock in ways that no human ensemble could ever achieve, while retaining the live performance element in all the other areas. We’ve created a sort of uber-ensemble that offers a glimpse of totally new ways of performing music hitherto unexplored. You still have to remember to bring your tuner though...